iPod Log 4: (mostly) perky edition.

Here I continue the tradition of sharing with my readers the pieces of music randomly selected by my iPod to play during some journey (this having been during a trip from my apartment via foot, subway and bus to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where my daughter, her friend, and I were treated to a private tour by a former colleague and present friend of my wife, who is an art historian, and expert on Byzantine art).

Jimmy Cliff, You Can Get It If You Really Want. Reggae doesn't get much perkier than this complete self-help book sung in two minutes forty-two seconds flat, from the soundtrack of the magnificent The Harder They Come (1973; see a promotional trailer and hear the title song below):

Johnny Nash, I Can See Clearly Now. The iPod stays in a reggae groove with this song that's so perky that the first time I heard it on the radio, I thought it was Poco. Feeling depressed? Just click on the arrow below:

Gabriel Fauré, Elégie, Jules Eskin, violoncello, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, conducting. The iPod must have sensed that I was in danger of a perkiness OD, so it served up a shot of musical sedative in the form of this lovely piece for cello and orchestra. Below is a clip of cellist Julian Lloyd Weber playing it with just piano accompaniment (unfortunately, the pianist isn't identified; if anyone recognizes him, please let me know):

John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, with Eric Clapton, It Ain't Right. Can the blues be perky? This rendition of a harp-driven Little Walter song shouts an affirmative response.

J.S. Bach, Brandenberg Concerto No. 2, 1st movement, allegro, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner conducting. Maybe the perkiest thing Big Daddy Bach ever composed.

Bruce Daigrepont, Laissez Faire.

Laissez-faire, laissez-faire, ma jolie
Bon temps roulé, allons danser, toute la nuit

This red hot Cajun song isn't as jarring coming after Bach as you might suppose. Indeed, it seems to fit quite nicely. Très perky, aussi.

Delbert McClinton, Dreams to Remember.

I know you said he was just a friend,
But I saw you kiss him again and again and again,
Honey, these eyes of mine don't fool me,
Why did he hold you so tenderly?

A fine example of the blues not being perky.

Fairport Convention, Jack 'o Diamonds.

Jack o' Diamonds can open for riches,
Jack o' Diamonds, but then it switches,
Covered by a picture, but it's only a ten,
Jack o' Diamonds...

Quick: how many rock groups that had their origins in the 1960s are still alive and performing, with at least one original member? There's the Stones, and one or two others, including these guys. Well, they're all guys, now, but at their inception they had a woman singer, Judy Dyble, who was with them for their first album, from which this steady, driving rocker comes. Before the second album, she left to join another group and was replaced by the lovely, tragic Sandy Denny. Below is a clip of the band's first lineup, doing "Time Will Show the Wiser", also from their premiere album, with Ian McDonald (later known as Ian Matthews) on lead vocal and Judy Dyble, and a very young Richard Thompson, on harmony:

Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Li'l Liza Jane. Classic New Orleans Dixieland brass with vocals, including some nimble scatting, doing a song I used to sing while marching in ROTC camp. This is from the excellent Rhino New Orleans Party Classics CD. Man, you talk about perky.

Willie Nelson, Crazy. Very early Willie, done in the overproduced, deracinated "countrypolitan" style championed by Chet Atkins, but nevertheless his voice and delivery, and a great song that he wrote but was first made a hit by Patsy Cline, triumphed over adversity.

Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose Perky? Pour qui?

Rolling Stones, Rip This Joint. This is beyond perky; this is frenetic. Again, words would fail doing it justice, so here's a live performance video:


Ritchie Valens, Come On, Let's Go. Valens was a fireball in the rock 'n' roll firmament: signed to his first record contract at the age of seventeen, within a year he had hits off both sides of a disc, "Donna" and "La Bamba" (the latter the first rock hit sung in Spanish), and died before his eighteenth birthday in the plane crash that also ended the lives of Buddy Holly and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. "Come On, Let's Go" was Ritchie's first record release. It is muy perky.

The Band, Long Black Veil.
Enough of perky for now. I first knew this mournful song from the Kingston Trio (see my commentary on them here), though it was originally recorded by country music legend Lefty Frizell. The Band's version is on their first album, Music From Big Pink, which has a generally lachrymose quality, accentuated by the keening falsetto of Richard Manuel. Here's a video of the song from a live performance, featuring my late sometime Lion's Head and Lone Star Cafe drinking and (on one occasion) singing companion, Rick Danko:


Aretha Franklin, You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.

When my soul was in the lost and found,
You came along to claim it,
I didn't know just what was wrong with me
'Til your kiss helped me name it

The iPod stays in a meditative groove with the Queen of Soul.

The Kingston Trio, Riu Chiu. It's July, so, of course, it's time for a Christmas carol; specifically, a sixteenth century Spanish villancico sung a capella in spine-tingling three-part harmony. I couldn't find a video of the Trio doing this, but here is a rendition by Chanticleer:


W.A. Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, Overture, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, James Levine, conducting. So, my journey ends with an overture. And a right perky one, at that.

Please help a City child.

In my immediately previous post, I mentioned having taken my daughter, Liz, to a camp in Maine. This is the third summer she's been able to enjoy some time on a lake shore in the woods, hiking, swimming, sailing, learning archery and so on. Anyone who has been reading this blog for some time knows that I'm a confirmed urbanite, thoroughly in love with my adopted home, New York City, and especially the Borough of Brooklyn. I think the City is a great place to raise kids, and that City kids, on the whole, kids of all colors, persuasions and income levels, are great kids. But, much as the City provides these kids with a rich environment in which to grow and learn, they also need occasional respite from its busy-ness and a chance to enjoy things that the City cannot offer.

Unfortunately, not all City kids have families who can afford to send them to camps, take them to country houses, or even get away for a long weekend. For over 130 years, the Fresh Air Fund has been providing economically disadvantaged youngsters with summer vacations in the country. To do this, it has relied on people with primary or vacation homes in rural areas not too far from the City to host a child for a week or ten days. Details of the program can be found at the Fresh Air Fund website.

This year, the Fund is in need of more families willing to host City kids for a short but very important vacation. Volunteers are especially needed to host older children (9-12) and boys. The Fund, of course, checks all volunteer hosts for suitability, and the vetting process for this summer must be completed by the end of this month. So, if you have a house in upstate New York, northern New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, central Massachusetts or Cape Cod, and would like to share a small part of your summer with a City child, please go to the website (there's a schedule of what areas and communities will be hosting Fresh Air children on what dates on the web page) and contact the Fund through the links provided on the site. If you cannot host a child, but want to help the Fund in its good works, you may also make a financial donation through the website.

Please give this your consideration, and be aware that time is of the essence. Unless more host families can be found quickly, as many as 200 children may not be able to enjoy summer vacations.

Bet the inmates had fun making this one.

Yours truly in Mickey D's parking lot, Sturbridge, Massachusetts, on the trip back from Maine after dropping Liz off at camp. I got the car from Avis in Brooklyn, but it had Nutmeg State tags.

I need to keep working on that paunch. More Bridge walks, less Cognac.

Addendum: The car is a Dodge Avenger, and that's a name with a history. The first "Avenger" in the Chrysler family was made by Hillman, part of the British auto manufacturer Rootes Group, which was taken over by Chrysler in the late 1960s. Versions of the Hillman Avenger were marketed in the U.S. as the Dodge Polara and Plymouth Cricket. My second car was a pre-Chrysler Rootes product, a 1965 Sunbeam Alpine.

"I can call spirits from the vasty deep."

So says Glendower in Henry IV Part I*, Act 3, Scene 1. To this, Hotspur replies:

Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

My efforts at baseball prognostication seem about as efficacious as Glendower's summoning of spirits. Just over a month ago, I posted here, declaring the Mets as good as dead this season. I also offered this gem of an opinion:

[F]iring the manager isn't going to do the trick. Indeed, at least in the short run, I think it's likely to make matters worse.

Well, in the short run, the Mets have a winning record since the Midnight (PDT) Massacre à trois, though it's an open question whether the change of managers caused this (perhaps a better theory, given the improvement in pitching, both from starters and bullpen, is that the change of pitching coaches made the difference), or whether we may just be seeing an instance of the Hawthorne effect.

Indeed, one of the things (perhaps the principal thing) that makes baseball fascinating is the number of variables involved in the outcome of any game, or season. Recognizing this, I'm foreswearing any further attempts at predicting the Mets' (or any other team's) fortunes after the All Star break.
___________

*Demonstrating the enormous effect Shakespeare has had on the understanding of English history, Sellar and Yeatman, in their magisterial 1066 and All That, assert that there were two Kings Henry IV: Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part II.

Mike and Mies

In this morning's New York Times, Harvey Araton writes of Mets starter Mike Pelfrey's improvement from a shaky start this season. The turning point was the May 31 game against the Dodgers when, according to Pelfrey, he "went out there with a plan." That was to ease up, not overthrow, not give up walks. During the first inning, Brian Schneider, the catcher, puzzled by the relative softness of Pelfrey's pitches, went to the mound and asked him if he was hurt. Pelfrey said he was just making sure that he hit his spots, and added, "I want [the batters] to hit it." Pelfrey stayed in for seven innings and, as Araton notes, "began a run in which he has allowed slightly less than two earned runs a game over eight starts, winning his last five." Pelfrey had this observation about the L.A. game: "What I learned that day was, hey, I can back off if I have to; that less can be more."

In saying that, Pelfrey was, perhaps consciously, paraphrasing one of the greatest architects of the past century, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose maxim, "Less is more", is exemplified by the Seagram Building, which is iconic of the International Style that dominated post-World War II architecture.

Photo of Pelfrey from Chicago Mets Fan; photo of Seagram Building from John Snavely's Blog.

Obama and "elitism", again.

It's one thing for The Reverend Jesse Jackson to diss Obama for "talking down" to African Americans, but for (as I've learned from Rumproast) Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild to call him "elitist"; well, lah-ti-dah.

Icing on the cake is the comment by Betty Cracker: "Good god, what next? Amy Winehouse calling Christopher Hitchens a tosspot?"

Which prompts Kevin K of Rumproast to muse: "I wonder if Winehouse would last longer at waterboarding than Hitchens did?"

Greater New York: not just for New Yorkers.

Greater New York is a blog, written by Peter Eisenstadt and Rob Snyder (update: David Polonoff is also a contributor), that is concerned with New York City and its environs, but takes into account issues "in the wider world", as exemplified by Peter's thought-provoking essay on Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke. In addition to politics and history, Greater New York considers cultural matters, as in Rob's review of On the Heights, winner of this year's Tony award for Best Musical. As the authors note:

Greater New York is not so much a place on the map as a shared destiny and a common goal that we all hope to reach.

Paul Simon - "American Tune" (1975)

One of the commenters on this YouTube clip notes that the chord progression comes from Bach. Another wonders who Bach stole it from.

Update: Now I think I know the answer. It struck me that "American Tune" is closely based on the Tom Glazer labor anthem "Because All Men Are Brothers". This website states that the tune for that song was Bach's O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (also the basis for the English passion hymn "O Sacred Head Now Wounded") from the St. Matthew Passion. Bach, in turn, based this on H. L. Hassler's Mein Gmüth ist mir verwirret, in Venusgärtlein (Nuremberg, 1613). Now we can wonder where Hassler got it.

A fountain, a ship, some boats.

This morning, the WQXR announcer predicted a high of ninety degrees. I rose quickly to go for my walk over the Brooklyn Bridge before it got too hot and muggy. I was out the door by eight, and made my way briskly up the Promenade and across the Bridge. On the Manhattan side, I made my customary little side trip to the City Hall Park Fountain, pausing to get this photo before heading back to the Bridge.


Back on the Bridge, as I approached the west (Manhattan side) tower, I noticed a container ship, assisted by two Moran tugs, leaving its berth at Red Hook (since the time of the linked post, the Port Authority has decided to renew the lease of the operating company for the Red Hook container port, thus extending its life at least for the term of the new lease). I got this shot from the vantage point of the west tower.


By the time I got to the middle of the Bridge, the ship was almost broadside to me. She proved to be ANL Esprit, of the former Australian National Lines, now part of the much larger French CGM Group. She is one of the cargo ships that include accommodations for passengers, like lovely Abbie and Natalie. Here she is as seen from mid-Bridge:


As I approached the east tower, I saw this bright red tug pulling two empty barges:


By the time I reached the east tower, ANL Esprit had almost completed her turn to head out the Buttermilk Channel toward the lower harbor:


Off the Bridge, and onto the Promenade again, I saw two yachts, a large schooner and a small sloop, crossing in front of Ellis Island:

Proud to be a lawyer, redux.

Last November, I posted about a rally, organized by the New York City Bar Association, in support of Pakistani judges and lawyers who had been detained or relieved of their duties by the government of General Pervez Musharraf. The principal speaker at that rally was Ali Ahsan, a Pakistan born attorney practicing in New York, whose father is President of the Pakistani Supreme Court Bar Association, and who had been imprisoned at the time.

Yesterday, Ali Ahsan's father, Aitzaz Ahsan (photo above), was greeted with a standing ovation at a morning meeting at City Bar headquarters. In the time since the November rally, he had been released from prison, where he and many other lawyers and judges had been detained under a statute that allows arrest and confinement "to prevent the commission of a crime" (or similar words), and elections had been held which resulted in Musharraf's party being relegated to a splinter group in Parliament. Nevertheless, the new government has not yet, for reasons having to do with coalition politics, rescinded Musharraf's order stripping the Supreme Court and many lower court judges of their jurisdictional authority.

In his address to the City Bar, Mr. Ahsan recounted his difficulties in acting as defense counsel for Chief Justice Chaudhry of the Supreme Court, which were increased by the proceedings before the judicial tribunal being held in secret. He revealed one interesting aspect of Pakistan's legal system when he said that, in briefing the appeal to the Supreme Court, he cited as persuasive authority court decisions from India, with which Pakistan has been in conflict since the inception of the two nations, along with decisions from Australia, the U.S., Trinidad and Tobago, and Belize. This is because all of these nations share with Pakistan the tradition of British common law, a tradition that evidently transcends national rivalries.

Mr. Ahsan was generous in his praise of American lawyers, and Americans in general, for their support of the cause of rule of law and human rights in Pakistan. He said this feeling of gratitude was shared by many Pakistanis, but that the silence of the Bush administration on the issue of reinstating the judges and restoring the rule of law had been unhelpful. He argued forcefully that the restoration of judicial authority was essential to the fight against extremist and terrorist organizations, as such groups thrive where people have no recourse to legitimate authority to adjudicate disputes.

Mets demonstrate regression to the mean.

Statistics was about my least favorite field of study. What you learn is that, while wonderful things can happen, they are very unlikely; and, if they do, they are very, very unlikely to occur again anytime soon. Perhaps the most depressing statistical concept is regression to the mean. This tells you that, if someone has a history of doing badly, then suddenly has a run of success, that run will almost certainly end and s/he will return to her/his pattern of failure.

Back in May, the Mets beat the Yankees twice, at Yankee Stadium. One game of the three game series was rained out and rescheduled for this past Friday as part of a doubleheader, the first game to be played at Yankee Stadium and the second at Shea. Anyway, after the Mets swept their abbreviated series, I posted this celebratory piece, with the cautionary note, "just don't backslide". By writing this, of course, I was challenging the notion of regression to the mean, and regression prevailed, in a big way, as the Mets then dropped four straight to the Braves.

So, now, as I savor the Mets having won their season series with the Yanks, I see them regressing once again, dropping tonight's game to the Cards, 7-1, as John Maine has his turn in the starting rotation's frequently used barrel. The Mets thus also blew a chance to help the Cubs, a team I may have jinxed, who were swept this weekend by their Southside rivals.

Tim Marchman bets on regression to the mean in his column in the New York Sun about Ollie Perez.

The Bells of Hell

This is a slightly abridged and edited version of a piece I posted on the Fray three years ago as a comment on an article in Slate about "Bohemian New York", by Inigo Thomas, in which he mentioned Café Loup, which now occupies the space formerly taken by a great bar called The Bells of Hell.

The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling,
For you but not for me,
And the little devils how they sing-a-ling-a-ling,
For you but not for me.
Oh death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,
Oh grave, thy victory?
The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me.

-British Army song

I discovered the Bells in the summer of 1976, following the breakup of my brief first marriage, when I was moving from Bank Street off Abingdon Square to smaller digs in what had been the notorious Van Rensselaer Hotel, newly rehabbed as a yuppie warren, on 11th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. Although I had lived in the Village for three years, I'd never had occasion before to walk the block of 13th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. When I saw the awning with "The Bells of Hell" on it, my first thought was that this was a bit far north and east for a gay leather bar. On the way back, I looked in the window and saw a sign that said, "Traditional English, Irish and Scottish Music." Being a big fan of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and their ilk, I resolved to check the place out sometime.

My first visit to the Bells was on a weeknight, when there was no live music. I found a vacant barstool near the door. To my left was a burly man with dark hair, and beyond him a brown-haired woman with glasses and a Scottish accent. The man introduced himself as Gary and his friend as Barbara. We chatted pleasantly while the jukebox cycled through "Dancing Queen" by Abba, Billy Connolly's spoof on Tammy Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E", Mna Na h'Eireann by the Chieftains, "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M, "Hot Stuff" by the Rolling Stones, "I Can't Get Started" by Bunny Berigan, and "Highland Paddy" by the WolfeTones. Gary and Barbara filled me in on the history of the place. It had been started a couple of years before by the actor Malachy McCourt (now, along with his brother Frank McCourt, famous as a writer), who had been somewhat cavalier in the matter of paying Con Ed (the local electric company) and, as a consequence, had for a time done business by candlelight and with an ancient mechanical cash register. Malachy later sold the place to two Englishmen, Tony Heyes and Peter Myers. Tony is a Liverpudlian dockworker's son who had gone to Oxford on scholarship, gotten a Ph.D. from Michigan, ran the McGovern presidential campaign in Kentucky and Tennessee, and, during his tenure as a Bells owner, had a day job as an academic dean at the College of New Rochelle. (He later gave up academe and wrote a newspaper column on horse racing; the last I heard, he was doing some sort of business in Latvia.) Peter is a mountaineer and member of the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team. (He is now the proprietor of Myers of Keswick.) He is also a friend of Mick Jagger, who would visit the Bells now and then. (Many times I walked in and was told, "Oh, Mick just left" or "Right after you left last night, Mick came in." What I might have said if I actually encountered Mick is beyond my comprehension.)

The following Friday, I went again, and caught a show in the back room by two singers named Chris King and Mike O'Brien. As they were singing about "Men who strived, and men who died/ To tear the red rag down", I looked behind me and saw the two Brit owners grinning, no doubt thinking about the money they were making off this "Paddy music," as Gary had told me they called it. I decided it was definitely my kind of place.

During my time at the Bells I had lots of long, alcohol-fueled conversations with the likes of Nick Tosches and the late Lester Bangs. One night I was moved to make my confession of musical sin to Lester. I told him about several what I was sure he would consider lapses of taste, including liking Gordon Lightfoot. "Hmph," Lester said, "I know Gord. Do you know what he does when he needs inspiration to write a song? He goes to the hardware store and stares at the labels on cans of paint."

One of the Bells' regulars was an elderly Black man named Al Fields. Al had a private drink he called "kerosene" that included two or three kinds of clear liquor as well as (I think) Ouzo, served over ice in a beer mug. After a couple of these, he would often go to the back room and play the old upright piano that stood on the stage. One night, the members of The Clash were at the bar (I was elsewhere that night, natch) and were so impressed by Al's performance that they had him back them up on "Julie's Been Working for the Drug Squad" for their album Give 'em Enough Rope; however, Al's contribution was not included in the album's final cut.   

I introduced my friend and law firm colleague Charlie McCrann to the Bells, and he also became a regular. He recruited several members of the cast of Toxic Zombies there. To my everlasting regret, Charlie was in his office on the 100th floor of One World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001.

For much of 1978 and '79, the Bells' house band was Turner and Kirwan of Wexford, consisting of Pierce Turner, who is now a successful solo artist, and Larry Kirwan, who now fronts Black 47. I have a CD made from a tape of Pierce and Larry's last performance at the Bells, climaxing with their cataclysmic 22 minute version of "The Foggy Dew," at the end of which you can hear me whooping ecstatically.

The Bells died in August of 1979. Its nemesis, I understand, was (fittingly) an enormous arrearage due to Con Ed. Afterwards, most of the Bells crowd, including me, migrated to the Lion's Head, a somewhat more staid venue frequented by, as Ace Gillen, one of its regulars put it, "drinkers with writing problems." The Head lasted until the mid 1990's, and its demise marked, for me at least, the end of any semblance of Bohemia in Greenwich Village.

Mariners celebrate a night without the DH.

Something like this could only happen to the Mets: their ace starter gives up a grand slam to the opposing pitcher. Listening to the account of the game on WQXR this morning, I was surprised to hear that it was the first homer ever by a Seattle pitcher. Then it struck me: "D'oh! They're an AL team. They play ninety nine percent of their games with the DH."

See the fun you've been missing, guys?

Update: Twiffer (see comments) says: "as far as the general DH discussion goes, i thought we agreed to disagree? [grin]". Indeed we did. This post wasn't meant to try to convince you, Twiff. It was meant for those who perhaps could be convinced, or for those on my side who might need more ammunition.

In other words, I will continue my campaign against the DH until my dying breath. I just won't expect you to join.

How Aurora Borealis almost destroyed civilization, and how Bobby Kennedy helped to save it.

I vaguely remember reading this tale before, but Richard Holbrooke, in his review of Michael Dobbs's One Minute to Midnight--Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, recounts how, on "Black Saturday" (October 27, 1962), the day of maximum tension in the Cuban Missile Crisis, an American pilot named Chuck Maultsby (no doubt a CIA operative), "confused by the Northern Lights, wander[ed] hundreds of miles into Soviet airspace and somehow escape[d] without triggering a Soviet reaction." That reaction might well have been a full-press thermonuclear attack on the U.S., as Soviet forces were on hair-trigger alert, anticipating a possible U.S. strike in retaliation for their having shot down a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane, just like the one Maultsby was flying, over Cuba earlier that day.

That evening, as Holbrooke recounts, on President Kennedy's direction, Attorney General Robert Kennedy

summoned the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin...and told him that the crisis had reached its moment of truth. ...With the downing of the American U-2 that day, Bobby Kennedy said that the American military, and not only the generals, were demanding that the president "respond to fire with fire." This meeting, coupled with a letter to Khrushchev skillfully drafted by Bobby Kennedy, Ted Sorensen and others, led to the Soviet announcement the next day that the missiles would be removed from Cuba.

So, we have another example of the thermonuclear bullet being dodged, but this time by action instead of inaction, and at the top instead of near the bottom of the chain of command. How many times can we be so lucky?

George Carlin, 1937-2008

In the summer of 1971, I was an Army second lieutenant going through the field artillery officer basic course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The Sooner State in summertime is no treat, but my three month stay did produce close encounters with two famous entertainers. The first was Lou Rawls, who was featured on Soul Night at the Fort Sill Officers' Club. He sang on the patio as I went through the buffet line, getting ribs, black-eyed peas, greens, cornbread, and (yes!) watermelon.

The other occurred on a long weekend when I got in my car and headed west with the intention of getting to high mountains. After driving most of a day and part of a night, including a spectacular run north and west of Tucumcari on a road that skirted the edge of a deep canyon, along which I saw working cowboys on horses, I ended up in Taos, New Mexico. After checking into a motel and having the best Mexican dinner since I'd left San Antonio at the age of five, I went looking for action. At the center of town was a shopping complex done in the worst sort of 1960s brutalist style, a bunker-like structure with great expanses of exposed, unpainted concrete. On one of these walls I saw a sign pointing down a staircase that descended from street level, saying "Downstairs at the Sunshine Company".

I went down and found a small bistro, fairly lively but not overcrowded, was able to get a small table not far from a stage that was unoccupied at the time, and ordered a beer. As I was about halfway through my first beer, a man dressed in black pants and shirt, with thinning brown hair and a scruffy beard, took the stage without any introduction and started a routine about parochial school, where the object was to get girls to throw up ("Hey, Mary Margaret, looka this! BLEAGGGGH!") He then shifted into a discussion of drugs: how the word had become a synonym of everything wrong with the younger (i.e. my) generation, yet how prevalent drugs of legal varieties were ("Coffee, the little daily cup of speed."). Next he riffed a bit on the misunderstandings arising from the hipster usage of "shit" as a synonym for marijuana. When he got onto serious theological stuff, I nearly fell out of my chair.

I finished my beer, and waved to the waitress to get another. When she delivered it, I asked who was the comedian. "That's George Carlin," she said. "He's a friend of the owner and he's doing the gig for free."

Update: Jerry Seinfeld has this appreciation on the op-ed page of today's New York Times. "[L]ike a train hobo with a chicken bone" is a simile I will treasure.

A heartfelt apology to Cubs fans.

A few posts ago, I expressed the hope (having lost faith in this year's model of my beloved Mets) that this might be the year you would be able to celebrate your team's first World Series championship in a century. I should have realized that, by publishing this, I was jinxing, even cursing your team's fate. My name should begin with "B", because I'm as bad as any billy goat, or black cat, or Bartman (now here's a team that's been beset by killer "B's").

Update: OK, things looked better today. But remember, the Mets are 2-0 against the Yanks so far this year, and, aside from hometown bragging rights, it's done them no good.

A survivor on the Lakes

Edna G was the last steam powered tug in use on the Great Lakes. She was retired from service some twenty years ago, but remains tied to this pier near an ore dock somewhere on the shore of Lake Superior. She appears well cared for in this photo taken just a few weeks ago--perhaps some historical society has made her its charge.

Thanks to TenaciousK for taking the photo and posting it on Tenacity Central.

Update: TenaciousK (see comments) writes:

Hi Claude! She's moored to a working pier at Two Harbors, a town about 30 miles north of Duluth. According to the placard, she is kept in working condition, and was completely restored in 1994. I figure with diesel prices being what they are, perhaps someone is thinking her retirement will not be, er, permanent.

He also gives a link to this Wikipedia article about her, which says she's listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and has a footnote indicating she's under the care of the Lake County (Minnesota) Historical Society.

Probably the last commentary on the firing of Willie Randolph.

I went to Google Images to find the perfect Willie photo for this post and, in wonderful serendipity, found it on a most unusual and fascinating sports blog called A Pudge is a Sandwich, from which I filched the image at left. What's fascinating about APIAS is the odd aggregation of teams it covers: "Vols [Tennessee], Cats [Kentucky, not Northwestern or Vermont], Wolverines [Michigan], Cubs, Tigers, A's, 49ers, Bengals, Bears and Mets" (note that the Mets get separated from the rest of the MLB by three NFL teams--does this indicate they were an afterthought?). Perhaps the only thing I can guess from this odd assemblage of rooting interests (as well as their penchant for finding flimsy reasons to include photos of scantily clad, amply bosomed women in their posts) is that the people who put out APIAS are all feisty Appalachian Scotch-Irish lads with a taste for (with the exceptions of Tennessee in football and women's basketball, Kentucky in men's basketball, and Michigan in anything) underdogs.

Anyway, I have little more cogent to say about what will surely go down in Mets history as the Midnight (PDT) Massacre than has been said by Smoothron in APIAS. All I have to add is that I mourn the loss of Willie, inevitable though it had become, because he was a genuine local hero, the first for the Mets since John Franco. He grew up in my beloved, adopted Brooklyn rooting for (as any Brooklyn kid should) the Mets, and can be forgiven for having spent most of his professional career with the hated Yanks. Them's the breaks.

Goodbye, Willie. May you find a new gig, one that will bring you success, soon.

Extry: Smoothron himself drops by (see comments) and leaves the following gem:

Nothing like a top-of-the-10th HR to get Jerry his first win!!

The Mets have impressed me lately with their ability to come back in extra innings, and I'd like to see Manuel have a successful run as interim (maybe permanent, if he's interested) manager. I still don't see a miracle comeback from their miserable start, and will be happy if the Cubbies take the Series this year. Of course, I'm always open to being surprised.

Nippon Maru: Japan comes to Brooklyn.

Brooklyn was part of the round-the-world itinerary for Mitsui O.S.K. Lines' 21,903 GRT cruise ship Nippon Maru, shown here docked at Red Hook on June 11. Could her visit have been timed to coincide with the Brooklyn Museum's exhibit, Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770-1900, or even Murakami?

A baseball diatribe wherein, sadly, I will offend several friends.

I'm sick and tired of the 2008 Mets. And I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I wouldn't feel this way if they'd have shown themselves to be feckless bozos from the git-go. I'd be in a funk, for sure, but it would be a simmering funk from which I could easily be diverted by something like a good book or a blues concert. What I hate is the recurrent cycle of raised and dashed hopes. Roller coasters can be fun, but I want off this one.

So, what's to be done? With respect to the Mets themselves, and Tim Marchman to the contrary notwithstanding, firing the manager isn't going to do the trick. Indeed, at least in the short run, I think it's likely to make matters worse. What about going up the food chain and canning Minaya? He's been around long enough to bear the blame for some of the team's current problems, but I suspect they run deeper than anything for which his removal would be a solution. Minaya got a rep in Montreal for producing overacheiving teams on a tight budget; the Mets are big budget underacheivers. Perhaps the luxury of having some money to throw around made him lose some of his edge. But he's a smart guy and likely to regain it. Firing the Wilpons isn't an option, unless someone can put together enough bucks to convince them to sell. It's hard to imagine, though, a new owner that wouldn't be worse. Most likely, it would be some entertainment-oriented conglomerate that would be clueless about baseball but unwilling to let people who know the game run the show.

In short, I don't see any magic bullet solution to the Mets' woes. They are, I suspect, rooted in a team culture that's been developing for twenty two years, since the Mets last won a World Series, and after which the owners, perhaps responding to other owners' entreaties to hold the line on salaries, let some important players from that championship team go to free agency. Is there such a thing as the Curse of Ray Knight?

Seeing no short-term solutions to the Mets' problems, what am I to do? I could simply decide to ignore baseball for the rest of this season. It's tempting--there are lots of other attractive uses for the time I spend tearing out what little hair I have left every time Reyes makes some goofball error, either with his glove or on the basepath; Delgado grounds into a double play with one out, runners on first and third and the other team up by one in the eighth; Heilman takes the mound in the eighth with a two run lead and leaves down by one; or Perez has a Dark Night of the Soul and gets yanked in the third after notching his ERA up two more percentage points.

But, there's something potentially very exciting going on in the baseball world this year. Actually, a couple of things. The Tampa Bay Rays, after ten years of expansion team frustration (nine lasts and one fourth place finish in the AL East) are in a duel with the Red Sox for first place in their division. I consider Tampa my "hometown", having lived there from the second half of sixth grade through college. Nevertheless, there are a couple of obstacles to my rooting for the Rays. One is that it would upset my household, as my wife is a Red Sox fan. The other is that I find it very difficult to support any American League team, though I've made an exception for the Red Sox, at least when they're not playing the Mets, and especially when they're playing the Yankees.

So, on to the other thing. This really appeals to the history buff side of me. There's a team, an NL team to boot, that hasn't won a Series championship since 1908--exactly a century ago, that now holds a solid division lead. I mean, of course, the Cubbies. I could root for a team that hasn't won it all since the administration of William Howard Taft. Also, I have weaknesses for: Frango mints, "dragged through the garden" hot dogs, the fiction of Saul Bellow, the art of Manierre Dawson, the architecture of Louis H. Sullivan (Boston's gift to Chicago), the blues, and Wilco. A little fling with the Northsiders might fit nicely. In addition, the Cubs have as their skipper my Tampa homeboy, and a true gentleman, Sweet Lou.

So, sorry, Arch. I still think the Cards are the team I would love best if my love were granted on purely aesthetic grounds, despite the diversion from the true faith of little ball during the unfortunate Mark McGwire era. And I know how y'all just loathe the Cubs. Sorry, August; I'll always have a soft spot for the O's stemming from the first regular season major league game I attended, in which Boog Powell proved the decisive factor with a late inning two run homer against the Yanks. Sorry, too, Twiffer, and Dearest Wife. Though if it does come down to a Cubs vs. Red Sox series, I'll keep very quiet.

Mostly, sorry to all the loyal Mets fans (including Homer Fink and Joe Martini) for what I promise is a temporary apostasy. I have confidence that, in the long run, the Mets will solve their problems. Of course, in time, they'll develop a whole new set, but that's how the game goes. Just for now, though, "Ya gotta believe!" rings hollow for me, and I must avert my eyes.

Update: Joe Martini (see comments) takes heart from yesterday's fifteenth inning triumph over the Diamondbacks, a team whose number the Mets seem to have had for some time (despite the previous night's especially dispiriting loss). This may well energize the Mets enough to crank out a few more wins, perhaps even bring them a notch above .500, but it'll be like a sucker rally on Wall Street before the next vertiginous drop. Joe, who also admits to a period of Cubs fandom, and was at Shea for the black cat game in 1969 (though by then I presume he was rooting for the Mets, whose route to their first championship was smoothed by a Cubs collapse), concludes with: "Look... I rooted for my team when they lost 120 games. This is easy."

Yeah, well, I could have rooted happily for the 1962 Mets, a gaggle of no-hope misfits and losers and a few grizzled veterans, skippered by a lovable old baseball legend who knew how to make lemonade from a lemon by doing tummy medicine commercials with the Mets' blooper reel in the background. What annoys me to distraction about this year's Mets (actually, it's been going on for several seasons) is their ability to rouse hopes, then smash them like cheap china. The Cubs may end up doing the same--if they do, it will be characteristic of them--but then the Red Sox had a similar pattern going into the 2004 season.

Steven Goldman has some encouraging words in today's New York Sun. Another wretched Mets season, he thinks, may be just what the doctor ordered.

Twiffer, sensing my attraction to losers, suggests that I root for the Nats. Most mornings, on my Brooklyn Bridge Walk, I pass a guy going the other direction wearing a dark suit and a blue cap with a squiggly "W". I keep wanting to stop him and ask, "Why?" Some teams--the '62 Mets, the pre-'55 Brooklyn "Bums"--are lovable losers, some, like the Red Sox from 1918 to 2004, are tragic losers, and some are just plain losers. Besides, it's a cursed location. To update an old saw: What is Washington? First in war, first in peace, and last in the NL East

Fuller's ESB, with a short discourse on the history of malt liquor.

This is yet another post inspired by Twiffer, who, in commenting on my post about Alice Feiring and anti-Parkerism, bemoaned the unavailability of his favorite brew, Fuller's ESB (more about what those initials stand for below) in stores in the Washington, D.C. area. My suggestion to Twiff is that he direct his complaint to the British Embassy, who will no doubt see fit to lodge a protest, and may even be willing to share with him some of the case or two a month I'm sure they get by diplomatic pouch.

Anyway, Twiff's paean to this ale led me to want to give it a try--oddly, I'd never had it. Luck was with me yesterday as my wife, my daughter and Kei Andersen accompanied me to the Atlantic Chip Shop for dinner, and ESB was on tap there. I did not suffer buyer's regret. Lately, my taste has run to assertively hoppy IPAs like Dogfish Head. With ESB, by contrast, it's the malt that announces itself first, a caramel-y caress to the middle of the tongue, like a flourish of woodwinds, before the hops hit the back, a soft swell of strings in a minor key. It was a balance that worked nicely with the Granny Smith, walnut and Stilton salad we shared as a starter, and the bangers and mash I had for my entrée.

On this side, you'll sometimes see ESB called "Extra Special Bitter", but if you're in Britain and ask for that, the person tending bar is likely to give you a quizzical look. Over there it's usually just "ESB", but if you ask anyone what that stands for, you'll be told, "Extra Strong Bitter". (Update: Judging by the number of hits on this post from England off web searches for "ESB stands for what?" or similar, I'm convinced "anyone" is far from a safe bet.) Using "strong" as an adjective in a trade name or advertising for any alcoholic beverage in the U.S. would be a major no-no. Laws and regulations here provide that alcoholic content, as a percentage or "proof", must be printed on every label, but nothing else may be said by way of puffery, e.g. "kicks like a mule" or "two shots of this and your troubles are over".

This brings back a memory from my early 1960s high school days. A TV commercial: camera shot of the middle of a table, wrought iron painted white with a glass top, on a patio with golf links in the background. On the left, a man's hands; in front of the hands, a Pilsner glass and a twelve ounce beer can, with no readable brand name. on the right, another man's hands; in front of them a Pilsner glass, but next to it a stubby eight ounce can with the label "Country Club". Need I say (given the decade and the setting) that both men are white, and have the sort of accents one would find in the spiffier suburbs of Northern New Jersey, Westchester or Southern Connecticut? The dialogue is something like this:

MAN ON LEFT: Nice round of golf.

MAN ON RIGHT: Thanks.

LEFT: What's that you're drinking?

RIGHT: It's Country Club malt liquor.

LEFT: Malt liquor?

RIGHT: Yes. It's less bitter, with less filling carbonation, and it has more [here the man on the right picks up the stubby can and slams it down on the glass for emphasis] AUTHORITY [translation: it has more ALCOHOL] than beer.

LEFT: Hmmm, I'll have to give that a try.

So it was that malt liquor (by law, any fermented malt beverage above a certain percentage of alcohol by volume--the threshold varies from state to state--may not be called "beer" or "ale", but must be called "malt liquor") was first marketed as a beverage of choice for white, upper middle class men. Then some genius did some market research and found out who was really buying the stuff; as the saying goes, the rest is history (and bye-bye eight ounce cans).

Addendum: There's a good piece on the history of malt liquor here. Joe Martini has inspired me to search YouTube for classic Colt 45 TV commercials from the 1960s featuring an impassive "spokesman" and "Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio music." Here's the best example I could find:


Thanks to adclassix for the clip.

Walking the Bridge.

I've made it a habit, more mornings than not, to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, do a lap around the City Hall Park Fountain, and walk back to Brooklyn, perhaps extending my walk by going left after descending from the Bridge walkway toward DUMBO, there to get some croissants, and maybe a baguette, from Almondine.

This morning, there was heavy fog at water level up to above the level of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. When I got up onto the bridge, I was above the fog. Here's the scene looking towards Manhattan, with the unlovely and unloved Verizon Building to the right and the lovely and much loved (even by James Joyce) Woolworth Building to the left.

Clinton concedes; Collins comments cogently.

Gail Collins has a valedictory for Hillary's campaign on today's New York Times op-ed page. After quoting some despairing remarks by Muriel Fox, one of the founders of NOW, Ms. Collins gives some historical perspective with this:

Feel free to make fun of them. The women of Fox’s generation ought to be used to it by now. The movement they started was the first fight for equality in which the opposition deployed ridicule as its most lethal weapon. They won the ban on sex discrimination in employment by letting a conservative congressman propose it as a joke. When they staged their historic march in New York in 1970, they heard themselves described as “braless bubble-heads” by a U.S. senator and were laughed at on the evening news.

She concludes with this:

For all [Clinton's] vaunting ambition, she was never a candidate who ran for president just because it’s the presidency. She thought about winning in terms of the things she could accomplish, and she never forgot the women’s issues she had championed all her life — repair of the social safety net, children’s rights, support for working mothers.

Gotta read this.

Twiffer on elitism.

I've been cogitating about a post on the same topic. It may yet happen. (I know, "Promises, promises... .")

Update: Towards a more colorful vocabulary. Reading the comments on Twiffer's article, I learned that arugula is also called "rocket".

I can't wait for my first opportunity to ask for a rocket, Bartlett pear and gorgonzola salad.

So sad that it's come to this.

As we anticipate the passing of this kidney stone of a Democratic primary campaign, Rumproast dubs HRC "Sen. Veruca Rodham Salt".

Update: Relief may be in sight.

Goodbye to a legend.

I'd like to think that Buddy, the Bopper and Richie (not to mention the King, Eddie and good ol' Roy) were tuning up, getting ready for a jam to rock the cosmos.

Update: DJ Stan has assembled a magnificent Bo Diddley/Buddy Holly playlist on Struts and Frets. Herewith a few humbly suggested additions:

Fleetwood Mac: "Buddy's Song". From Kiln House, an album I love that was critically panned--one scribe called it "Buddy Holly-obsessed" (although it includes no Holly covers). This is the second best Buddy Holly song not by Buddy Holly. According to the playlist on the vinyl album, the song was written by Ella Mae Holly, but the notes to the CD indicate it was penned by then Fleetwood Mac guitarist Jeremy Spencer, and "generously credited to Holly's mother".

Bo Diddley: "Say, Man!" Oddly, this paleo-rap from 1959, consisting of a Platonic dialogue between Bo and his maracas-shaking sideman, Jerome Green, was Bo's only record to crack the top forty. For some reason, this exchange sticks in my mind:

Bo: Look-a here!
Jerome: What's that?
Bo: Where are you from?
Jerome: South America.
Bo: What's that?
Jerome: South America.
Bo: You don't look like no South American to me.
Jerome: I'm still from South America.
Bo: What part?
Jerome: South Texas!

Tom Rush: "Love's Made a Fool of You". A snappy cover of a lesser-known Holly song by one of my favorite 1960s vintage folkies, and a Hah-vahd man to boot. If I had to choose a theme song for my life, this might be it.

Buddy Holly: "Everyday". An inspiring song for people whose theme song is the above.

Blondie: "I'm Gonna Love You, Too". From the killer Parallel Lines, a hyperkinetic rendition of another lesser-known Holly song.

Alice in Wine Blog Land

A while back, someone offered me a taste of a California cabernet sauvignon. My impression was of a suspension of Woo-Woo-Welch's grape jam (without, however, the concord foxiness) fortified by a generous splash of Everclear. I spat and said the first word that came to mind, which was "Parkerilla."

It wasn't Graham Parker, whose album The Parkerilla was a blot on an otherwise distinguished, and still ongoing, rock 'n' roll career, to whom I referred. It was Robert Parker, fellow lawyer turned tastemaker, publisher of The Wine Advocate, author of several wine books, and unquestionably the most powerful person in the world of wine today. In assessing wines, Parker gives the usual "hints of black currants and kippered herring" kind of commentary (Some such commentary makes me think of Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."), but also assigns precise numerical grades to each vintage, in effect saying, Red Queen-like, to those scoring less than 90, "Off with their heads!", and thereby playing into the American mania for quantification and score-keeping. Consequently, lots of people do their wine shopping on the basis of Parker ratings, which many stores include in their ads and helpfully display next to each bottle.

Parker's preference for what he calls "hedonistic fruit bombs", that is, wines with overpowering fruitiness and high alcohol, has shaped demand to the extent that many wineries, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, have tailored their technique to produce wines that fit that description and stand fair to get high Parker marks. Because of these wines' massive, chest-thumping quality, I decided to give them the epithet "Parkerilla." As you may have guessed by now, I prefer wines with more--how you say?--nuance. So, I shudder as the Parker juggernaut rolls, apparently inexorably, along.

Fortunately, I have some allies who are waging anti-Parkerilla guerilla. One of them is my Kings County compatriot, Brooklynguy. Another, whom I have just discovered, is Alice Feiring, who puts out the estimable blog Veritas in Vino. Up top on her home page, under the heading "Appellation Feiring", she lets you know where she stands:

I’m looking for the Leon Trotskys, the Philip Roths, the Chaucers and the Edith Whartons of the wine world. I want my wines to tell a good story. I want them natural and most of all, like my dear friends, I want them to speak the truth even if we argue. ...I’m trying to swell the ranks of those who love the differences in each vintage, who abhor homogenization, who want wines that make them smile, think, laugh, and feel sexy.

Ms. Feiring champions the concept of terroir, which, like many French words, is hard to translate neatly into English, but boils down to the notion that a wine's taste should reflect the idiosyncracies of the environment in which it was produced (Again this brings to mind Humpty Dumpty: "When I make a word do a lot of work like that, ...I always pay it extra."). She has taken the battle into the heart of enemy territory, writing an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled "California wine? Down the drain", in which she characterizes the bulk of that state's wine as "overblown, over-alcoholed, over-oaked, overpriced and over-manipulated." In other words: Parker-ized to the hilt. This prompted a counter-attack in the same newspaper, in which Matthew DeBord called her a "terroirist" and delivered such gems of wisdom as:

[T]he "terroirists" lambasted California -- which by this time had become the most successful winemaking region in the history of, well, wine -- for imposing a bland style on the rest of the world. America promotes democracy and market capitalism. California promotes wines that don't suck. This cannot stand.

Alice, of course, responded, calling DeBord "the Sean Hannity of the Wine World" and herself a "terroir jihadist." The comment thread following her post, in which she participates, is well worth reading. She offered further commentary in a Q&A format here.

Alice is promoting her new book, The Battle for Wine and Love, or How I Saved the World from Parkerization, and, in furtherance of that, will be at my daughter's favorite after-school hangout, the new Barnes & Noble at 97 Warren Street (corner of Greenwich) in Tribeca, at 7:00 P.M. this coming Monday, June 2. New Yorkers, and anyone else who happens to be in town then, please take note. I'll definitely be there to:

(1) buy the book;

(2) get her to sign it; and

(3) blow her a kiss on the way out.

Subsequent events, including some in mid-June in California (this woman has intestinal fortitude!), are listed on her blog.

Update: I meet Alice! Yes, I was there at the Tribeca B&N at seven sharp yesterday, to find most of the seats already taken. With luck, I found a vacant one at the end of the second row. After a couple of minutes, a woman who looked like Jackie O. when she was a young Jackie Kennedy, but with a nasal piercing, took the podium and introduced Alice, who looks like the fifth grade teacher you had a secret crush on, pretty not in a cover girl fashion, but in a wise yet vulnerable way.

She began by reading several sections of her book. The first was how she discovered wine, when her father's second wife invited her to raid the cellar amassed by her previous husband. The second was about her quest to meet the man who made the Barolo that she took in that raid and with which she fell in love, a quest that failed but in the course of which she learned much about Italy, its wines, and the reasons for their sad decline. The third was about Burgundy and her meeting with Parker. After reading, she invited questions. There was much discussion of new winemaking techniques, especially something called "biodynamics", of which Alice generally approves, but is afraid may become simply a marketing ploy. Asked what wines she particularly enjoys these days, she said she was especially fond of Loire wines, as well as some Côtes du Rhône and some Beaujolais.

When my turn came to have my copy of her book signed, I handed her my blog card, and she said she had read this post, and liked it. She then signed the book, "Thanks so much." I will now put on my shameless shill hat and say, "Buy Alice's book. It's great."

Auf wiedersehen, Franz

...I have been concerned with...the way the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life. At the same time the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating new myth, and that myth is part of the fiber of our own lives.
-- Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)

I was a handsome man and had many women. But more important is to have a good wife, with whom one can share one's life.
-- Franz Künstler (1900-2008)

It's a commonplace to observe that World War I, the "Great War", was a hinge for history. Before August 1914, vistas of endless progress; after, disillusionment. Before, a balance of power; after, a constant struggle for supremacy. Of course, this oversimplifies. Bolsheviks had their belief in the inevitable triumph of the proletariat that would bring about utopia, but only after great struggle. Social democrats believed that melioristic policies could bring about a better world, but that belief was strained by the collapse of Weimar and the subsequent Great Depression. The Depression validated pessimism, and World War II enshrined it.

The number of people alive now who can remember the world before 1914 is quickly declining. Two days ago, one of the last surviving veterans of the war, and the last who fought on the side of the Central Powers, Franz Künstler, died at the age of 108. His life in a way reflected the turmoil of the just-over-a-century for which he lived. He was an ethnic German born in the Hungarian portion of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire to parents who were part of the German diaspora that extended through Eastern Europe to the valley of the Volga. When maps were redrawn following the collapse of the Empire, the place where he was born became part of Romania. He maintained Hungarian citizenship until the second defeat of Germany in World War II led to the expulsion of many East European Germans from their native countries to the now-diminished and divided Germany. Like Frank Buckles, the last surviving U.S. armed forces veteran of World War I, he also served in World War II.

Thanks to Ed Lenci for passing to me the news of Künstler's death.

From my window this afternoon.

The sound of an idling diesel engine brought me to the window, where I saw a busload of blondes in hot pink dresses competing to be the next Elle Woods in Legally Blonde (contest sponsored by MTV). They were assembling for a photo shoot on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. For a view of some of them there, with the lower Manhattan skyline as a background, see my post on Brooklyn Heights Blog.

Remembering Korea

Nobody wanted to call it a war, except those who fought in it. It could have been over soon after it began, thanks to General Douglas MacArthur's brilliantly planned and executed amphibious assault at Inchon, the success of which allowed Republic of Korea (ROK) and U.S. troops to capture the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, in October of 1950, less than five months after North Korean troops had invaded the South.

Shortly after American troops entered Pyongyang, as the late David Halberstam tells in his last book, The Coldest Winter, word came that some ROK units that had proceeded north from the capital towards the Yalu River, the border with China, had encountered some resistance and needed help. Units of the U.S. First Cavalry, still wearing summer uniforms, were sent north for what was expected to be a quick mop-up against remnants of the defeated North Korean army. What ensued was a horror, as inexperienced commanders, brought over recently from stateside, deployed the troops poorly, and headquarters willfully ignored intelligence that showed a substantial deployment of Chinese troops in the area. MacArthur was determined to take his troops to the Yalu, while China had warned that it would consider any move into the North Korean provinces bordering the Yalu an act of war. MacArthur, confident in his knowledge of the "Asiatic mind", was sure they were bluffing.

The unit that took the heaviest hit in the Chinese attack was the Eighth Regiment of the First Cavalry, which had been deployed in a northern salient that, as one experienced soldier put it, made it stand out "like a sore thumb." After the Eighth's position had been almost completely overrun, a battalion command post, where many wounded had been taken, remained with a tenuous escape route to the south. The soldiers there realized that before long their defenses would fail and the command post would fall. As Halberstam describes it:

On midday of November 3, Peterson, Mayo, Richardson, and Giroux went over to the CP for a final doomsday kind of meeting. Because he was not an officer, Richardson [a sergeant first class] did not attend the meeting, but he knew what it was about. All of the officers, many of them wounded themselves, were talking about a forbidden subject--what to do with the wounded in the terrible final moment that everyone knew was coming. ...

What heartbreaking decisions for young men to make, Richardson had thought to himself and still pondered half a century later.

Of these four men, only Mayo escaped. Peterson and Richardson both were captured, and survived two and a half years in prisoner of war camps. Giroux was also captured, but died of his wounds. Overall, in this battle, the Eighth Regiment suffered eight hundred casualties, losing half its authorized strength.

The Korean War began at least in large part because of an unintentional omission from a speech by a consummate diplomat: Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, neglected to include South Korea within the Asian "defensive perimeter" of the U.S. It was prolonged by the willfulness, in the face of convincing conflicting evidence, of a great military commander. Remember this.